pasty day

This is my third entry in the {W}rite Of Passage writing challenge. You can check out other entries at the bottom of the post. This week’s instructions were:

Take fifteen minutes to write about your elementary school lunch. Describe. Remember. Smell. Touch. Who is there? Where are you? What are you eating?

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Pasty day meant freedom. Freedom from the confines of the school yard. Freedom to leave the fenced fields, playground, swings, and tetherball courts and venture into the world beyond. The pasty shop was about 150 yards from the back entrance to the school grounds. With a note from our parents and $1.50, we had permission to walk out that gate, down the sidewalk, and into the pasty shop. We were to buy our pasty and return to school. We must have had a chaperone. But in my memory that person is invisible. It was as though the chains of bondage were thrown off, and we were free.

For the uninitiated, pasties are Cornish meat pies. If you’ve seen Sweeney Todd, the pies Mrs. Lovett ends up filling with the remains of Sweeney’s victims are basically pasties. Sorry if that throws off your appetite. [By the way, if you haven't seen Sweeney Todd, go get the Johnny Depp version from Netflix or Blockbuster or however you get your movies these days. I prefer the original Great Performances version with Angela Lansbury, if you can find it, but Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Co. do a pretty great job bringing the Demon Barber of Fleet Street to the big screen]. Pasties were a fixture of our small Northern California Gold Rush town because the gold miners had been mainly Cornish. They brought their meat pies with them, and a local tradition was born. There were several pasty shops in town, but it was King Richard’s that was close enough for we wee folk to walk to, so it was their pasties that became for me the yardstick by which to measure all others.

Looking back, the pasties weren’t really that good. The crust was more doughy than flakey. The fillings were often chewy (Have A Little Priest?) and generally lacked seasoning. They generally consisted of meat and potatoes, with perhaps an errant hunk of carrot or onion. Copious amounts of ketchup were required. Some went for the more traditional vinegar, but I didn’t swing that way. Still don’t. I’d buy my beef pasty and my milk and head back to the lunchroom to eat it.

There was a clear divide between the pasty kids and the non-pasty kids. My parents didn’t always have money to give me for pasty day, but when they did it was an invitation to an elite group of more worldly, cultured, and cosmopolitan second graders. Not only were we eating world cuisine, we got to leave school grounds to buy it.

King Richard’s isn’t there anymore. There are still pasty shops in my hometown, and those that remain are generally thought to produce a better product than the pasty of my youth. But my nostalgia for that place is strong. You can find pasty recipes online and in various cookbooks. If you ever make a batch, leave at least one a little doughy for me, and pass the ketchup.

Tagged as: childhood, school, write-of-passage